Sunday, February 9, 2014

Lost in Translation

Lost
in Translation

2003

Director: Sofia Coppola

Starring: Bill Murray, Scarlett
Johansson, Giovanni Ribisi

I
need to say this straight off the bat: I can’t write a normal review of Lost
in Translation. Expect precious
little of what’s to follow to be my typical attempts at any sort of analysis of
the filmmaking techniques, production design, or story symbolism. Apologies if that’s what you wanted.

Right.
On with it then.

I’ve
only seen Lost in Translation twice; once, in 2004 after it came out on
DVD, and just a few days ago for the 1001 Movies Blog Club. Despite the decade since I last saw it, I
vividly remember that initial experience.
It was late at night, I was a little tired, my
then-boyfriend-now-husband had gone to bed, and I sat down to watch this film
that my friend Dyami had been gushing over.
I really enjoyed it – I knew I would – but as it came to a close, I
remember being overcome by incredible emotion.
I remember sobbing my way through the final scenes, then continuing to
sob rather uncontrollably for at least another thirty minutes. Something in this film had touched a nerve, a
very raw nerve, that the lateness of the hour and my tiredness only
exacerbated. In seeing it for a second
time, that nerve was not quite as exposed, but still there nonetheless.

Bob
Harris (Murray) is a middle-aged washed up movie actor being overpaid to
promote whiskey in Tokyo, Japan. He
forgets his son’s birthday while his wife FedExes carpet samples to his hotel
room. Charlotte (Johansson) is a college
grad who majored in philosophy and now finds herself married to a photographer
(Ribisi) and without any idea what to do with her life now that she’s tagged
along with him to Tokyo. Both Bob and
Charlotte feel completely alienated by not only Tokyo but their lives, and this
is enough of a commonality for them to strike up an unlikely friendship.

Bill
Murray is so wonderful in this film, and I remember, at the time, that it was
such a BIG FREAKIN’ DEAL in the media.
Everyone, and I do mean everyone, was all “holy F*%@ Bill Murray can
actually act and express emotions and everything!” He was nominated for his one and only Oscar
for his role as Bob Harris, but something I’ve been thinking about is that no
one should have been THAT surprised.
Frankly, Murray’s filmography for the ten years prior to
Lost in Translation was building up to this, a perfectly seriocomic
role. In my opinion, it all starts with Groundhog
Day in 1993, then goes on to Ed Wood with Tim Burton in 1994,
then most significantly on to Rushmore in 1998 and The
Royal Tenenbaums in 2001, both with Wes Anderson. The fact that Murray was specifically
choosing work that defied his early slapstick routines (he also managed to be
in a Shakespeare movie before Lost in Translation) was
apparent. Since Lost in Translation, he
has continued his relationship with Wes Anderson, becoming in some ways a grand
duke of the indie film scene, and has also cultivated a relationship with Jim
Jarmusch of all people. I give Murray
all the credit in the world for clearly seeking divergent film roles, because
he is just wonderful when he tones down the stupid comedy and allows the
sadness to peek through. I’m not
surprised at all that a generation of younger filmmakers have wanted to use him
in their work.

I
don’t often write about it on my blog, but back in 2004, I was in a PhD program
doing biochemistry research. I was
utterly miserable, but I hadn’t yet realized I was miserable. (It would take another 18 months for me to
finally face the issue and leave the program, moving on to something that
DIDN’T take a jackhammer to my sense of self-worth.) Like Charlotte, I was in my early to
mid-twenties and I felt adrift. And that
night that I watched Lost in Translation for the first
time, this film was an enormous trigger that managed to convey some of the
hopelessness and lack of direction I was drowning in. Although I still could not completely admit
it to myself at the time, now with 20/20 hindsight I have no doubt that the
minor breakdown this film gave me was because I identified a bit too much with
the emotional message here. When I
watched it just a few days ago, the tears at the end were caused not by a
current sense of angst in my life, but of remembrance; recalling just how
emotionally draining and numbing those years in the lab were, recalling just
how pathetic I felt then, how utterly useless and ineffectual I thought I was
because my experiments never worked (not once, not ever, not even the goddamned
controls did what they were supposed to do), how much of a failure I thought
myself. Quite frankly, this film isn’t
the easiest thing in the world for me to watch, not because it’s bad or
horrific, but because it has a way of pulling all those old emotions out to
surface.

Which
is definitely a bit of a testament to the film, because I was working in a
biochemistry research lab and Charlotte was in Tokyo for a few weeks. Not exactly the same thing.

It’s
very difficult for me to be objective or analytical about this film. This is a much more subjective experience for
me, as I just watch this and feel. I
feel Charlotte’s depression as she tries to tell her friend she doesn’t know
who she married only to have the friend blow her off. I have also had a friend during this time in
my life who was a bit like Bob Harris, someone who, although a generation apart
from me, I connected with and who I got along extraordinarily well with and who
made me forget, albeit for short periods of time, how much sadness I was really
hiding. Although an argument can be
made, depending on your frame of mind, that Coppola pushes the relationship
between Bob and Charlotte to the brink of sexual tension, and I honestly do not
think that I ever had *that* kind of relationship with my friend, I relate yet again
to understanding the feeling of respite caused by an unlikely friend.

This
movie. This movie was my early to mid-twenties. The deep seated denial that I was sad (I
wasn’t supposed to be sad, I was in biochemistry PhD program for crying out
loud), the feelings of hopelessness and uselessness that almost consumed me, Lost
in Translation brings it out in a beautiful, sadly poignant way. On the surface, my story is not at all like
Charlotte’s, but Sofia Coppola knew what she was doing, knew that her
particular story of cultural alienation could really strike far deeper.

This
is not a movie I can watch lightly or “have on in the background.” I’m in a much better place now than I was ten
years ago, but the experience in the lab was a bit emotionally scarring and I
still struggle with some of those feelings of loss of self-worth (and I have a
feeling I will always feel like something of a failure). Lost in Translation is a film that
reminds me of that phase of my life, for better or for worse, and while it
makes me happy to know I’m not there anymore, this movie has a way of reminding
me just how painful those years were.

For
the record, I think this movie is awesome.
It just strikes a bit too close to home for me to watch it with any
regularity.

Arbitrary
Rating: 9/10, and apologies if you actually wanted me to talk about the movie
rather than whinging on about myself.

10 comments:

Well, if it is any comfort, I have friend who work with molecular biology who tell me similar stories.In any case I think it is a great movie who can trigger such emotion and this is certainly a movie that touches on some basic concepts of human connection and lack of same.I love this film and have watched it a dozen time, but then again I have no painful relationship with it. It is one of the few movie where I have actively sought out the location and it is truly awesome.

Apparently, the dirty little secret of grad work in the sciences is that it sucks and is soul-crushing for everyone. BUT NO ONE FUCKING TALKS ABOUT IT. It would have seriously changed things for me if I didn't feel so utterly and completely alone in my suffering. Only once I made the decision to leave did people start commiserating with me, saying that yes, they felt that way too. And in the years since, I've heard from MANY MANY people that their experience was similar to mine.

That makes me mad. Because I was so adrift, so sad, and so isolated.

But apparently, so was everyone else.

I don't regret for a second my decision to leave, but if I had some support - ANY support - if I hadn't felt like my struggles were mine and mine alone and I was somehow wrong and off and different, when in reality most were suffering, it would have made a difference.

I used to spend two years in the basement of the physics department designing and conducting experiments in a wind tunnel. It was tedious, but also fun at times, except when the other departments closed down my experiment because the particels from my smoke machine contaminated the optics lab and the electronmicroscope, so I had to spend 3 month and my entire budget on building a chimney. I was mighty proud of my work, although conducted in stark isolation, and we started setting up a PhD program around it, only then to find out that my results were utter bullshit. A different branch of litterature could have told me that, but too late. I got my degree, some nice LIDAR cross sections of wind flow and a nice job outside academia and never for a second have I regretted skipping the PhD program. I pulled the plug in time or I would have been in your shoes. Now I have a side job as an external on a university and I have grad students doing projects. I find that one of my primary obligations as a supervisor is to make sure they limit their scope into what is actually manageable and get through it with a good experience and so far, knock knock, none of them have failed. Fortunately the university I am associated with favors group projects and it helps the students support each other.

For what it's worth I think the exact same dirty little secret of grad work applies to the humanities, too. I don't know this from first-hand experience, but my father graduated with a Bachelor's in English, married my mom, and started working on a Masters in English. When mom got pregnant with me, he dropped the grad work and got a real job, but he always said later that it was kind of a relief, because he hated the program. He probably used the phrase "soul-crushing" a time or two. Instead of working on experiments that never yielded usable results, he was reading and interpreting literature and then butting heads with thesis advisers who disagreed with his interpretations and dug in their heels that they were right and he was wrong. Fun stuff!

I think the reason so few people talk about it is because it's hard to express it without coming off like sour grapes; there's a real fear that people will think you couldn't hack it in the grad program and that you dropped out because of your own failings, but you're blaming it on the system failing you. Obviously that's crap, but, you know, easier to avoid the issue by just leaving it all unspoken and undisturbed. But good for you for opening up about it sincerely - I hope somewhere out there a cinephile biology or chemistry major considering doing a PhD program reads your post and gets another side of the story.

Lost In Translation is totally great. And honestly, at the end of the day great art is about the universals of the human condition, as told through specific well-chosen details. It shouldn't strike anyone as odd that someone who struggled in a PhD program would relate to a story about someone struggling with directionlessness in Tokyo. When a story is unrelatable on a plot elements level AND on an emotional level, that's when something weird is going on.

I just wanted to say that I really appreciate what you lovely gentlemen had to add to this conversation, mostly because it makes me feel, yet again, as though my struggles were not necessarily atypical, that there wasn't something inherently wrong or maladjusted about my approach to my work, that the reason nothing worked for me wasn't perhaps solely my fault. Being completely honest, there are days even now where I still feel like it was, that it WAS just me, that I was somehow inept and "to blame," that I was incompetent, but the more I talk about those years, the closer I feel myself to permanently accepting that I don't need to shoulder all the blame.

And yes, Sunny, I VERY much appreciate that a movie whose plot has nothing whatsoever to do with grad school struggles speaks so much to my own personal experience. That says so much about the emotional themes in the film, that I was able to read my own story into it to such an incredibly depth.

Happy end to the story: I became a high school teacher and I'm a rockin' chemistry teacher (my husband gets jealous of how often students say positive things about me) and I'm the head of our science department and I present at statewide conferences and I've put in applications to present at national conferences. I don't miss the lab for a second, and I strongly believe that i was not meant to be there. I was meant to be in the classroom. It all turned out for the best, it just took half a dozen years or so to shake out.

I don't think they get really withing sniffing distance of sexual tension. Their relationship reminds me of an obscure song called "The First Lady of Delaware" by the equally obscure group The Seymores. The line before the chorus is, "Sometimes I wonder, well, if you were ten years younger where we might meet." To me, that's what's going through their heads all the time--if only I was/you were 25 years younger/older.

Beautiful movie. Sometimes we get these things that just resonate, or meet us at the right time.

I completely understand how a movie can strike a nerve. I've talked before about how the end of Field of Dreams really hit me, having lost my father just a few years earlier. I didn't have an experience like yours with Lost in Translation, but then neither character was one I particularly identified with, either.

I think, as film-lovers, we all have "those movies" that affect us in an overly subjective way based on our personal experiences. I can only imagine what "Field of Dreams" is like after you've lost your father.